"It's quite simple really. The Shang dynasty had to conduct horrifying human sacrifice rituals in order to force the Zhou to assume the Mandate of Heaven and create the socio-economic conditions for the emergence of the early cybernetic thought of the Daoists and Legalists, which in turn would create a reliable backstop society capable of taking high-openness Germano-Celtic developments in computing and calmly building them out into true RSI without immediately imploding in a terminally lucid efflorescence of rape orgies and apocalypse cults."
"Wait, so it's all just the singularity assembling itself from beyond the omega point again?"
"Always was."
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Following rumors of an American invasion of Brazil, President Lula da Silva declares the Northern Expedition to overthrow the Washington Government and guarantee the Republic of Brazil sovereignty ‼️‼️
People compare Frank Herbert with Martin and I think they're almost exact opposites.
Herbert was an actual genius. A lot of the interesting scholarship on Islam since 2010 has looked at the influence of Buddhism and Herbert was able to kind of intuit that as a weirdo crank weirdo homophobe paleocon autodidact.
The thing that actually gets me, though, is the Harkonnens - Herbert looked at the USSR in 1965 and foresaw it's transformation into a dynastic, fascist, decedent society based on oil money. He saw Putin and Aliyev during the literal peak of the USSR. Genuine prescience shit.
By contrast Martin mostly just inverts fantasy tropes and people mistake that as deep, he's better at internal character motivations and plotting than Herbert but he's just not a deep thinker about the kind of societies he's writing about.
ASOIF is best understood as the fantasy version of Hillary Mantel's Cromwell trilogy (shift from feudal to early moden society in Western Europe) and once it leaves that area it becomes a C- satire of the Iraq War.
Xavier: Renegade Angel is the only modern English-language media that utilizes wordplay with the same density and depth as Japanese works like the Monogatari series.